Science Glance
In the middle of the 7th century, a plague swept through the walled city of Jerash, in what is now modern-day Jordan.
Ceramicists abandoned their workshops under the Hippodrome, leaving unfired pottery in their haste. Young and old alike succumbed to a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis, the same microbe responsible for the Black Death seven centuries later.
The city, unable to manage the dead and dying, converted those workshops into a mass grave.
"It was filled within days — hundreds of bodies," says Rays Jiang, a University of South Florida geneticist and lead author of a new study in the Journal of Archeological Science, highlighting the plague victims of Jerash. "There's no ceremony, there's no grave goods. It's a bare minimum to get the bodies disposed of and away from the city."
To understand the lives of the people who died at Jerash, Jiang gathered a team of eight experts from various specialties: archeology, molecular genetics, anthropology and chemistry. Their work helps illustrate the devastation of what is believed to be the first historically recorded pandemic, which began with the Plague of Justinian and killed tens of millions of people across the Mediterranean Basin, West Asia and Northern Europe from roughly 541 to 750.
On February 26, 2025, a NASA probe called Lunar Trailblazer lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its mission was to map the water on the moon. But a day after launch, mission managers lost contact with the spacecraft, and it was never heard from again.
A newly discovered species of large dinosaur lived in marshy areas, hunted for fish and had an impressive horn protruding from its skull. It is the first time in over 100 years that scientists have discovered a new species of Spinosaurus dinosaurs, which are large fish-eating predators that first emerged during the Jurassic period more than 140 million years ago.
She navigated segregation to become an esteemed mathematician — and today, her work helps billions of people navigate the world.
Scientists may have discovered an explanation for a cosmic mystery uncovered by the James Webb Space Telescope several years ago: the origin of "little red dots" scattered across the cosmos.
NASA is cutting short a mission at the International Space Station due to a medical issue with a crew member. The agency is planning to return all four members of the Crew-11 mission more than a month early. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the crew would return to Earth "in the coming days."
The Nobel physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and includes a prize sum totalling 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million) that is shared among the winners if there are several, as is often the case.
